How the Idea of Industry-As-A-Platform Will Drive a Wave of Disruption

How the Idea of Industry-As-A-Platform Will Drive a Wave of Disruption

This article could just as easily have been headlined “How various empires will strike back.” But what are the empires and who will they strike back against? For the last few decades, the biggest players in most major industries have been sitting-out the computer and Internet revolutions as they’ve watched technology behemoths and startups sprouting-up around them, and then servicing them with goods and services that chomped away at their bottom lines. If the Microsoft of the 1980’s taught us anything, it was the degree to which software can be cheaply manufactured and massively reproduced to drive the kind of margins that most industries dream of. As if software companies weren’t already making enough profits, along came the Internet to drive down both distribution costs (think downloads vs. physical channels…